Knuth. What else is needed? If they can master all three volumes of Knuth they can teach themselves whatever else is needed from the manpages, or failing manpages by directly inspecting the binaries.
It's rather more than that. It's perhaps easier to extract what is, in effect the authors definition of "an application of free will" from the abstract quantity itself. Such an application is a decision which is not entirely the consequence of events that precede it.
Now if the experiments measuring particle a make an application of free will in deciding their choice of axes, and special relativity is OK, then the universe near particle b must also make an application of free will to decide the result of the measurement of particle b.
Lung are designed to be able to process most solids, mainly being able to destroy and remove small foreign solids (dust and a-like) that may pose problem (The bigger solids are coughed out so they don't end up inside the lungs - they pose problem, but higher up in the ventilation pathway).
The problem is when said micro particle are supposed to be indestructible (an attribute shared by both asbestos and nanotubes). Another problem is shape. The system is designed to process round solids, not very long thin ones.
I've heard rumour of people using electron microscopes to read the data bit-by-bit from partly trashed platters. With enough equipment and time you should be able to recover every bit of which a reasonable number of atoms are still present on the disk, unless whatever damaged the disk damaged the magnetisation.
I'm kind of surprised this wasn't done to the Challenger disk, rather than risk spinning the platters, so maybe it is just rumour, but it's a cool idea.
What you're missing is that Monty might have shown you the goat behind door 2, instead of 3. The fact that he didn't tells you something, and the consequence of that knowledge is that door 2 is a better choice than door 1.
While I have no problem with Bussard as an interesting engineer the fusion ramjet is (sadly) not even a little bit viable.
Briefly there are two problems:
1. ordinary hydrogen is very hard to fuse. Even at the centre of the sun the average proton takes about 10^10 years to fuse. Since the comrpressed interstellar gas is streaming through your ship at roughly lightspeed, even if "pinch" in your magnetic fields is 1km long, you have to get a decent proportion of it to fuse in 3 microseconds, so you need to achieve, in your pinch, temperature and density far far higher than at the centre of the sun. This seems difficult at best.
2. the interstellar medium (we now know) is best thought of as more like a froth than a uniform gas. Supernova shocks and other upsets clear "bubbles" and after a while almost all the gas ends up packed into relatively thin "bubble walls". Incoveniently, the Sun is sitting in the middle of a bubble several light-years across, so the interstellar gas is a very very thin round here.
Because a quantum computer does fundamentally more at each clock. Factoring an 1000-bigt integer takes CPU centuries on modern procesors but would be just afew million operations for a quantum computer.
The 15PB/year is after considerable reduction. As I recall the hadron pulses are something between 10 and 100 nanoseconds apart, so each detector sees between 10^7 and 10^8 collisions per second. For each of these, the detector is producing data from millions of sensor elements (these things are the size of a large house, and basically crammed with pixels. So the really raw data is well into the terabytes per second. About 90% of this data is thrown away by the sensor electronics and it then gets whittled down thrugh several more layers of filtering and compression before it's ever recorded at all.
The 15PB/year is the data that will be shipped to a dozen or two tier 1 data centres, 7 of which are in the US, where it will be stored and made available for analysis. A well-defined set of further reduced data will be shipped to a larger number of tier 2 centres, and so on.
Personally, I think the Linux kernel manages these issues quite well, if (by conventional standards) rather inefficiently.
The practice, as I see it is: "The current rules (layering, etc.) are enforced rigourously (at least in Linus' tree) but radical rewrites of the rules take place relatively often"
So if ZFS really does achieve wonderful things by violating the current layering it WON'T be accepted for Linux's kernel, but, if Linus can be convinced (via an appropriate chain of lieutenants, usually) that the layering is really an obstacle to achieving these things, we might see a completely new layering appear in 2.6.25 or somewhere, into which ZFS can fit. The inefficiency comes from the number of substantial pieces of work that get dropped because they don't fit in, or were misconceived. A more economically rational system would try to kill them sooner. Also, inefficiency arises from the fact that changing the filesystem layering would require every existing filesystem to be rewritten. Linux is notoriously unfazed by this, but in a commercial world, I suspect this would be too hard to swallow and you'd end up with all your filesystems fitting into the model except one, from whence come bugs and code cruft.
Time to dig out Project Daedalus. That study looked in some detail at navigation issues -- the probe has to locate the target star and/or planet mid-course and plan its own corrections.
Propulsion is the big issue though. Maybe something like starwisp could work,
Yes and no. The cloak is actually rigid, and fairly thick, not anything you might actually wear as a cloak. Incoming light (or, in actual devices built so far, incoming microwaves) from any direction at all, are bent around the object in the middle of the cloak and emerge on the other side just as if the object (and cloak) were not there,
So, instead of punishing people for doing something, you want to play mind games with them to subvert their will to do that thing?
By all means, if people want out we should help them. But trying to force people to want out (which is what such a system would do) is unreasonable
Not all. I said the system would deal with the problems of crack users etc. not force them to stop taking crack. Of course wanting to stop but being addicted is a problem, but otherwise the problem might be impure supplies, subsidiary diseases etc. The ethics of supplying addicts who don't want to stop with a drug that will kill them is dodgy, but we allow people addicted to rock climbing or motor racing to carry on, subject to reasonable restrictions to stop them endangering others, so I guess we've settled that one. Relatively few people actually choose to take their crack while living in a ditch scaring small children.
In a rational society, either the people's law enforcement system would take care of the problem of crack users, prostitutes, and polluteres ruining woody ravines near their homes, or the people would be empowered to take care of the problem themselves using whatever force is necessary.
In a rational society the medical system would take care of the problems of crack users and prostitutes.
The first Enigma machines were commercial freely available before WW2. While the Germans did try to keep the exact design of the military machine secret, that was just normal paranoia, not because they knew the crypto was weak once you had the machine. A standard 3 rotor Eingma has a keyspace of size 6 x 26^6, which in pre-digital computer days looked pretty good.
We don't need the nitrogen. Humans are reasonably healthy breathing pure oxygen at 22% of Earth's atmospheric pressure.
Even if you want the nitrogen for some reason, it's not used up, so you just need one batch, which you could ship. I'm pretty sure there is effectively NO accessible nitrogen on the moon.
Electrolyze water to make hydrogen, liquefy it and tanker it around.
There is a one-off loss for the electrolysis and a low loss from the fuel-cell at the other end assuming you want electricity and not (say) heat, but given how low bulk shipping costs are, there is essentially no loss or cost for the distance you carry it over.
Iceland is getting quite seriously into this idea as a way to export their hydroelectric & geothermal energy (currently they export it in the form of refined alumnium).
They are building a big materials testing lab in parallel with ITER (in Japan) precisely to simulate the neutron dose that the inner wall will receive and test materials in that environment.
The neutrons produced by DT fusion are an issue, but they don't have to be a long-term one.
You want as many of the neutrons as possible to end up in the lithium blanket, where they will breed more tritium for you (half-life 12 years, so surplus tritium can be got rid of easily enough, making valuable helium-3 in the process).
Some inevitably end up hitting the structure of your reactor, and much work is going into choosing materials that will either not absorb them or produce something with a short half-life (to stability) and decent structural strength. This irradiated wall material is basically the only radioactive wsste from a fusion reactor, and people are pretty confident it will just need to stored for a few decades before being safe again.
There's a fascinating document at http://caao.as.arizona.edu/publications/2004%20spi e%20plenary%20final%202.pdf comparing and contrasting three sites for a new major telescope facility. Suffice it to say that the top of an unclimbed mountain in the middle of Antarctica is the MOST pleasant and accessible of them.
Re:Difficult to measure material's properties?
on
Flexible Body Armor
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· Score: 1
It might have a role as a layer in composite armour. You could imagine it inside the Kevlar to reduce bruising.
Well, there might be some kind of very long cycle we are unaware of, but we do have a pretty good map of global temperature variations for most of the last million years (from antarctic ice cores) and it doesn't show anything like this as part of any of the natural cycles that show up in it.
It may be cheaper to reduce the speed or extent of climate change than to let it happen and adapt to it.
Give these people some credit for competence. Their analysis takes full account of the locations of the monitoring equipment (see reference 8 of the linked article).
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Knuth. What else is needed? If they can master all three volumes of Knuth they can teach themselves whatever else is needed from the manpages, or failing manpages by directly inspecting the binaries.
It's rather more than that. It's perhaps easier to extract what is, in effect the authors definition of "an application of free will" from the abstract quantity itself. Such an application is a decision which is not entirely the consequence of events that precede it.
Now if the experiments measuring particle a make an application of free will in deciding their choice of axes, and special relativity is OK, then the universe near particle b must also make an application of free will to decide the result of the measurement of particle b.
2 K is 2 Kelvin, not 2 thousand. The "damn n00b" was using the proper standard scientific units for temperature.
Well, if it had the degree symbol between the 2 and the K.
Actually no. The SI unit of temperature is the Kelvin, abbreviated K, with no degree symbols anywhere in sight,
The problem is when said micro particle are supposed to be indestructible (an attribute shared by both asbestos and nanotubes). Another problem is shape. The system is designed to process round solids, not very long thin ones.
I've heard rumour of people using electron microscopes to read the data bit-by-bit from partly trashed platters. With enough equipment and time you should be able to recover every bit of which a reasonable number of atoms are still present on the disk, unless whatever damaged the disk damaged the magnetisation.
I'm kind of surprised this wasn't done to the Challenger disk, rather than risk spinning the platters, so maybe it is just rumour, but it's a cool idea.
Anyone know enough to see if there is a chance of using the moon's gravity to assist the capture?
I read the article as saying that they have actually built one and that it works at room temperature.
What you're missing is that Monty might have shown you the goat behind door 2, instead of 3. The fact that he didn't tells you something, and the consequence of that knowledge is that door 2 is a better choice than door 1.
While I have no problem with Bussard as an interesting engineer the fusion ramjet is (sadly) not even a little bit viable.
Briefly there are two problems:
1. ordinary hydrogen is very hard to fuse. Even at the centre of the sun the average proton takes about 10^10 years to fuse.
Since the comrpressed interstellar gas is streaming through your ship at roughly lightspeed, even if "pinch" in your magnetic fields is 1km long, you have to get a decent proportion of it to fuse in 3 microseconds, so you need to achieve, in your pinch, temperature and density far far higher than at the centre of the sun. This seems difficult at best.
2. the interstellar medium (we now know) is best thought of as more like a froth than a uniform gas. Supernova shocks and other upsets clear "bubbles" and after a while almost all the gas ends up packed into relatively thin "bubble walls". Incoveniently, the Sun is sitting in the middle of a bubble several light-years across, so the interstellar gas is a very very thin round here.
Steve
Because a quantum computer does fundamentally more at each clock.
Factoring an 1000-bigt integer takes CPU centuries on modern procesors but would be just afew million operations for a quantum computer.
The 15PB/year is after considerable reduction. As I recall the hadron pulses are something between 10 and 100 nanoseconds apart, so each detector sees between 10^7 and 10^8 collisions per second.
For each of these, the detector is producing data from millions of sensor elements (these things are the size of a large house, and basically crammed with pixels. So the really raw data is well into the terabytes per second. About 90% of this data is thrown away by the sensor electronics and it then gets whittled down thrugh several more layers of filtering and compression before it's ever recorded at all.
The 15PB/year is the data that will be shipped to a dozen or two tier 1 data centres, 7 of which are in the US, where it will be stored and made available for analysis. A well-defined set of further reduced data will be shipped to a larger number of tier 2 centres, and so on.
Personally, I think the Linux kernel manages these issues quite well, if (by conventional standards) rather inefficiently.
The practice, as I see it is: "The current rules (layering, etc.) are enforced rigourously (at least in Linus' tree) but radical rewrites
of the rules take place relatively often"
So if ZFS really does achieve wonderful things by violating the current layering it WON'T be accepted for Linux's kernel, but, if Linus can be convinced (via an appropriate chain of lieutenants, usually) that the layering is really an obstacle to achieving these things, we might see a completely new layering appear in 2.6.25 or somewhere, into which ZFS can fit. The inefficiency
comes from the number of substantial pieces of work that get dropped because they don't fit in, or were misconceived. A more economically rational system would try to kill them sooner. Also, inefficiency arises from the fact that changing the filesystem layering would require every existing filesystem to be rewritten. Linux is notoriously unfazed by this, but in a commercial world, I suspect this would be too hard to swallow and you'd end up with all your filesystems fitting into the model except one, from whence come bugs and code cruft.
Time to dig out Project Daedalus.
That study looked in some detail at navigation issues -- the probe has to locate the target star and/or planet mid-course and
plan its own corrections.
Propulsion is the big issue though. Maybe something like starwisp could work,
Yes and no. The cloak is actually rigid, and fairly thick, not anything you might actually wear as a cloak.
Incoming light (or, in actual devices built so far, incoming microwaves) from any direction at all, are bent around the object in the middle of the cloak
and emerge on the other side just as if the object (and cloak) were not there,
So, instead of punishing people for doing something, you want to play mind games with them to subvert their will to do that thing?
By all means, if people want out we should help them. But trying to force people to want out (which is what such a system would do) is unreasonable
Not all. I said the system would deal with the problems of crack users etc. not force them to stop taking crack. Of course wanting to stop but being addicted is a problem, but otherwise the problem might be impure supplies, subsidiary diseases etc. The ethics of supplying addicts who don't want to stop with a drug that will kill them is dodgy, but we allow people addicted to rock climbing or motor racing to carry on, subject to reasonable restrictions to stop them endangering others, so I guess we've settled that one. Relatively few people actually choose to take their crack while living in a ditch scaring small children.
In a rational society, either the people's law enforcement system would take care of the problem of crack users, prostitutes, and polluteres ruining woody ravines near their homes, or the people would be empowered to take care of the problem themselves using whatever force is necessary.
In a rational society the medical system would take care of the problems of crack users and prostitutes.
The first Enigma machines were commercial freely available before WW2. While the Germans did try to keep
the exact design of the military machine secret, that was just normal paranoia, not because they knew the crypto was weak once you had the machine.
A standard 3 rotor Eingma has a keyspace of size 6 x 26^6, which in pre-digital computer days looked pretty good.
We don't need the nitrogen. Humans are reasonably healthy breathing pure oxygen at 22% of Earth's atmospheric pressure.
Even if you want the nitrogen for some reason, it's not used up, so you just need one batch, which you could ship. I'm pretty sure there is effectively NO accessible nitrogen on the moon.
Electrolyze water to make hydrogen, liquefy it and tanker it around.
There is a one-off loss for the electrolysis and a low loss from the fuel-cell at the
other end assuming you want electricity and not (say) heat, but given how low bulk shipping costs are, there is essentially no loss or
cost for the distance you carry it over.
Iceland is getting quite seriously into this idea as a way to export their hydroelectric & geothermal energy (currently they export it in the form
of refined alumnium).
They are building a big materials testing lab in parallel with ITER (in Japan) precisely to simulate the neutron dose that the inner wall will receive and test materials in that environment.
The neutrons produced by DT fusion are an issue, but they don't have to be a long-term one.
You want as many of the neutrons as possible to end up in the lithium blanket, where they will breed more tritium
for you (half-life 12 years, so surplus tritium can be got rid of easily enough, making valuable helium-3 in the process).
Some inevitably end up hitting the structure of your reactor, and much work is going into choosing materials that will
either not absorb them or produce something with a short half-life (to stability) and decent structural strength. This irradiated wall material is basically the only radioactive wsste from a fusion reactor, and people are pretty confident it will just need to stored for a few decades before being safe again.
There's a fascinating document at http://caao.as.arizona.edu/publications/2004%20spi e%20plenary%20final%202.pdf
comparing and contrasting three sites for a new major telescope facility. Suffice it to say that the top of an unclimbed mountain in the middle of Antarctica is the MOST pleasant and accessible of them.
It might have a role as a layer in composite armour. You could imagine it inside the Kevlar to reduce bruising.
Well, there might be some kind of very long cycle we are unaware of, but we do have a pretty good map of global temperature variations for most of the last million years (from antarctic ice cores) and it doesn't show anything like this as part of any of the natural cycles that show up in it.
It may be cheaper to reduce the speed or extent of climate change than to let it happen and adapt to it.
Give these people some credit for competence. Their analysis takes full account of the locations of the monitoring equipment (see reference 8 of the linked article).